NOTE TO SELF: I Seem to Have Brushed by Richard Hanania Twice
Once in linking to Henry Farrell, & once directly...
“Rising right-wing commentator turns out to be Nazi-KKK adjacent who wants to sterilize Black people and expel all Hispanics” is not a great surprise:
From June 30, 2022: Me:
I confess I am finding Richard Hanania a very powerful challenge to Darwinism.
At the very basic level, Richard Hanania’s brain ought to have evolved to like to be in a place where it can see women—just as the wild rooster likes to hang out around my father’s hen coop, just because.
At a more sophisticated level, Richard Hanania’s brain ought to have evolved to find “stor[ies] with… female cast[s]” very relatable.
Brains that did not would have been very bad at convincing women who interacted with it that the organism that surrounded them was a nice guy likely to be a good family partner, and so they would have told their friends to stay away from that brain and its surrounding organism.
You can say that the really-existing tropisms we see in Richard Hanania’s brain that make him a misogynist who cannot find Yellowjackets, or anything else with a “mostly female cast”, “relatable”—that that must have been genetically linked in the evolutionary past to some countervailing advantages which are now obsolete, and that evolution is slowly, slowly working now to eliminate Richard Hanania’s genes from the gene pool. B
ut I do not find that satisfactory.
Someone, please spin me a just-so evopsych story of how, in a species in which successful reproduction overwhelmingly requires convincing one single female that you are a reliable partner (as opposed to driving other males away by winning locked-horn battles), such High-Bro thought patterns as those Richard Hanania demonstrates can be adaptive and evolve, either genetically or mimetically:
Richard Hanania: Passing the Bechdel Test: ‘Yellowjackets…. A story with a mostly female cast can for me be interesting anthropologically… but is also usually not very relatable. Having what could be a male story with a female cast most of the time doesn’t work…. [There are] reasons for thinking that we are past the peak of wokeness in TV and movies… LINK:
From June 27,2023: Henry Farrell:
Hanania seemingly wants to reconstruct policy and intellectual debate around a center in which questions of race and IQ are once more legitimate topics of inquiry and discussion. Back in the 1990s (a time that Hanania is nostalgic for), soi-disant centrists such as Andrew Sullivan could devote entire special issues of the New Republic to the urgent debate over whether black people were, in fact, stupider than white people. Big Scientific Facts Said That It Was So! Now, that brand of intellectual inquiry has fallen into disrepute. Hanania, apparently yearns for it to come back…. Those claims about heritability and IQ are in there, and why Steve Sailer makes the cut [as an “Enlightened Centrist”]…. Matt [Yglesias] was one of the “CT mates”… in… 2004…. I’ve had disagreements with Matt since, on other stuff, but I am quite sure that both he and Ezra [Klein] are bitterly opposed to the whole race and IQ project that Hanania wants to relegitimize. I can’t imagine that they welcome being… lump[ed]… with racist creeps like Steven Sailer. But… Hanania wants so to lump them… [to get] a patina of legitimacy for opinions that have rightly been delegitimated… To see what Hanania is up to… look very closely at what seems superficially reasonable…. You (for values of ‘you’ that really mean ‘I’) don’t want to get dragged in further unless you absolutely have to. As Noah Smith, another of Hanania’s involuntary inductees into the Enlightened Centrist Hall of Fame said, “"Race and IQ" racism is a DDOS attack” on the time and attention of anti-racists…. [So] the best way of arguing with Richard Hanania is simply not to argue at all….
You wanna just-so evo-psych story that explains Hanania? Easy peasy. Rape! The bros gang up together, kill the worker-bee men, rape the women for the jollies, and then retire to their caves with the year's food supply. This would create a certain equilibrium between rapey guy genes and good provider genes. Which is kind of Veblen's view of the world, with a bit of Social Darwinism thrown in. Or Homer's for that matter. (Nietzsche is a bit more complicated.) Or the Seven Samurai.
It is a funny coinkydinks how often Tyler Cowan ends up adjacent to these racists. Fortunately he is a member in good standing of the Economics Profession(tm) and therefore cannot have any lust in his heart.